Rethinking relevance, rebuilding engagement

This report shares findings from a second wave of the Culture & Community research, collected in May 2021, over a year into the pandemic, and at a point when cases were falling before new variants emerged.

This report shares findings from a second wave of the Culture & Community research, collected in May 2021, over a year into the pandemic, and at a point when cases were falling before new variants emerged.

This Wave 2 survey tracked changes in key questions from Wave 1 and explored new lines of inquiry. They developed a new series of questions to explore the dynamics of race and identity in cultural engagement, perceptions of systemic racism across the cultural sector, and the roles that Americans want arts and culture organizations to play in addressing social issues.

Along with their partners at LaPlaca Cohen and Yancey Consulting, they named the second wave of this initiative Culture + Community in a Time of Transformation to reflect their hope that this difficult period — one in which the country has faced not just a pandemic but also a long-overdue racial reckoning and intense political polarization — would be an opportunity for genuine, system-level change.